Books: Current Books

THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK, by Doris Lessing (567 pp.; Simon & Schuster; $5.95). In her twelfth book, British Novelist Doris Lessing copes with not just one literary chestnut but a whole treeful: the sexual odyssey of a bachelor girl, the political disillusionment of a onetime Communist, the maladjustment of the overeducated modern woman. She succeeds in creating a remarkable heroine (possibly her alter ego) who somehow manages believably to combine the qualities of Kitty Foyle, Arthur Koestler and Simone de Beauvoir. Like Mrs. Lessing, Heroine Anna Wulf is a divorced writer who explains, in four different notebooks, why she is too troubled to write. Her black notebook looks back to an African experience that led to her first novel. The red records her political and intellectual life in London. The blue dissects her problems with men—which are considerable. The yellow has bits and pieces of professional writing. Individually, any one notebook gives an unsatisfactory picture of Anna, but by switching back and forth between the books. Author Lessing delineates, clearly and subtly, the relationships between the convicting parts of a complex personality.

CONFLICT, by Robert Leckie (448 pp.; Putnam; $6.95). In this first full-scale history of the Korean war, former Marine Robert Leckie dramatically reconstructs the bloody, bitter battles of a frustrating war. He brings alive the shock of the North Korean invasion, the "bugouts" of terrified G.I.s, the blare of Chinese bugles in the night, the quiet heroism of soldiers and marines dying on nameless hillsides in an alien land. Like many another marine. Leckie has a low opinion of General Douglas MacArthur, whom he charges with making a fatal mistake in splitting his forces for the dash to the Yalu River. Result was the disastrous rout of U.S. forces by the Chinese Communists, so poignantly described by S.L.A. Marshall in The River and the Gauntlet. But Leckie believes that the war was worth its high cost of 33,629 American lives. "In Korea." he writes, "invasion was repelled, and in such manner as to remind the world that an invader need not be destroyed to be repulsed.To gnash one's teeth because the invader escaped destruction is to revert to that concept of 'total war' which is no longer possible without mutual total destruction. Of Korea, then, it is enough to say: It was here that Communism suffered its first defeat. That was the only victory possible."